My early attempts at conversation were blighted, abortive things. I asked politely about her past and received clipped answers that discouraged further inquiry. I knew she was born in the central highlands of British East Africa in 1873, except that it wasn’t called British East Africa then; I knew she spent six years in the Gospel Society Mission School at Nairu, where she learned the queen’s English and wore the queen’s cotton and prayed to the queen’s God. Then she found herself in “considerable difficulty” and took the employment opportunity my father offered her.
“Ah. Well,” I said with pained cheeriness, “at least it’s not so hot here! Compared to Africa, I mean.”
Jane did not respond immediately, staring out the study window at the greenish-gold lake. “Where I was born, there was frost on the ground every morning,” she answered softly, and the conversation died a merciful death.
I don’t think I saw her smile a single time until Mr. Locke’s annual Society party.
The Society party was identical every year, with slight updates in fashion: eighty of Mr. Locke’s wealthiest collector friends and their wives would jam themselves into the downstairs parlors and gardens and laugh overloudly at each other’s witticisms; hundreds of cocktails would be transmuted into ether-scented sweat, ascending on cigarette-smoke spirals to hang above us in a heady fug; eventually all the official Society members would slink off to the smoking room and stink up the entire first floor with cigars. Sometimes I pretended to myself it was a grand birthday party for me, because it was almost always within a few days, but it’s hard to pretend it’s your party when drunken guests keep mistaking you for a serving girl and asking for more sherry or scotch.
My dress that year was a shapeless froth of pink ribbons and frills that made me look like a rather sulky cupcake. I have proof, unfortunately—that was the year Mr. Locke hired a photographer as a special treat. In the picture I am stiff and vaguely hunted-looking, with my hair so brutally pinned I might be bald. One of my hands is wrapped around Bad’s shoulders, and it is unclear whether I am clinging to him for strength or restraining him from eating the photographer. At Christmas Mr. Locke presented a small framed print to my father, perhaps in the charming belief that he’d take it with him on his travels. My father had held it in his hands, frowning, and said, “You do not look like yourself. You do not look like… her.” Like my mother, I assumed.
I found the picture facedown in a drawer of his writing desk a few months later.
Even in that wedding cake of a dress, and even with Bad and Jane standing on either side of me like glum sentinels, it wasn’t hard to disappear at the Society party. Most people regarded me as either a vague curiosity—having heard the rumors from Locke that I was the daughter of a Boer diamond miner and his Hottentot wife, or the heiress to an Indian fortune—or an overdressed servant, and neither group paid me much attention. I was glad, especially since I’d seen that slinky red-haired fellow, Mr. Bartholomew Ilvane, creeping along the edges of the crowd. I pressed my back to the wallpaper and wished, briefly and uselessly, that Samuel were there with me, whispering a story about a ball and a magic spell and a princess who would turn back into a serving girl at the stroke of midnight.
Mr. Locke was greeting each guest in a jovial, slightly accented boom; he’d gone to school somewhere in Britain as a young man, and liquor tended to burr his r’s and slant his vowels. “Ah, Mr. Havemeyer! Thrilled you could make it, just thrilled. You’ve met my ward, January, haven’t you?” Locke gestured at me, his favorite jade glass sloshing scotch over the rim.
Mr. Havemeyer was a tall, attenuated creature with skin so white I could see blue veins threading his wrists, disappearing beneath those pretentious leather gloves men wear to remind everyone they have a motorcar.
He waved a gold-tipped cane and spoke without looking at me. “Yes, of course. Wasn’t sure I could get away, what with the strike, but I got a shipment of coolies in at the last second, thank God.”
“Mr. Havemeyer is in the sugar business,” Mr. Locke explained. “Spends half the year on some godforsaken island in the Caribbean.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad. It suits me.” His eyes slid to Jane and me and his mouth curled into a smile-shaped sneer. “You ought to send this pair down to visit, if you ever grow bored with them. I’m always in need of more warm bodies.”
My whole body went chill and stiff as porcelain. I don’t know why—even growing up in Mr. Locke’s wealthy shadow, it was hardly the first time somebody had sneered at me. Perhaps it was the casual hunger burning like an underground coal seam in Havemeyer’s voice, or the sound of Jane’s indrawn breath beside me. Or perhaps young girls are like camels, and there are only so many straws they can carry before they break.
All I knew was that I was suddenly shaking and cold and Bad was leaping to his feet like a gargoyle come to terrible life, teeth flashing, and there was perhaps a moment when I could have grabbed his collar but couldn’t quite make myself move—and then Mr. Havemeyer was screaming in high-pitched fury and Locke was swearing and Bad was snarling around a mouthful of Mr. Havemeyer’s leg—and then there was another sound, low and rolling, so incongruous I almost didn’t believe it—
It was Jane. She was laughing.
In the end, things could have been much worse. Mr. Havemeyer received seventeen stitches and four shots of absinthe and was carted back to his hotel; Bad was confined to my room “for all of recorded time,” which lasted the three weeks until Mr. Locke left on a business trip to Montreal; and I was subjected to a several-hour lecture on the nature of guests, good manners, and power.
“Power, my dear, has a language. It has a geography, a currency, and—I’m sorry—a color. This is not something you may take personally or object to; it is simply a fact of the world, and the sooner you accustom yourself to it, the better.” Mr. Locke’s eyes were pitying; I slunk out of his office feeling small and bruised.
The next day Jane disappeared for an hour or two and returned bearing gifts: a large ham hock for Bad and the newest issue of The Argosy All-Story Weekly for me. She perched at the end of Wilda’s stiff, narrow bed.
I meant to say Thank you, but what came out was, “Why are you being so nice to me?”
She smiled, revealing a slim, mischievous gap between her front teeth. “Because I like you. And I do not like bullies.”
After that, our fates were more or less sealed (a phrase that always makes me picture a weary old Fate tucking our futures into an envelope and pressing her wax seal over us): Jane Irimu and I became something like friends.
For two years we lived in the secret margins of Locke House, in its attics and forgotten storerooms and untended gardens. We scurried around the edges of high society like spies or mice, staying mostly in the shadows, noticed only sporadically by Locke or his assorted minions and guests. There was still something confined about her, something tense and waiting, but now at least it felt as if we shared the same cage.
I didn’t think of the future much, and if I did it was with a child’s desire for vague, far-flung adventures, and a child’s certainty that everything would remain as it always had been. It did, mostly.
Until the day before my seventeenth birthday. Until I found the leather-bound book in the chest.
“Miss Scaller.”
I was still standing in the Pharaoh Room, still holding the leather-bound book in my palm. Bad was growing bored, issuing periodic sighs and huffs. Mr. Stirling’s toneless voice startled both of us.
“Oh—I didn’t—good evening.” I spun to face him with the book tucked behind my back. There wasn’t any particular reason to hide a scuffed-up novel from Mr. Stirling, except that there was something vital and wondrous about it, and Mr. Stirling was more or less the human opposite of vitality and wonder. He blinked at me, eyes flicking to the open chest on its plinth, then inclined his head infinitesimally.
“Mr. Locke requests your attendance in his office.” He paused, and something flitted darkly across his face. It might
have been fear, if Mr. Stirling had been physically capable of any expression beyond attentive blandness. “At once.”
I followed him from the Pharaoh Room with Bad’s claws click-clicking at my heels. I tucked The Ten Thousand Doors in my skirts, where it rested warm and solid against my hip. Like a shield, I thought, and then wondered why the idea was so comforting.
Mr. Locke’s office smelled as it always had, of cigar smoke and fine leather and the sorts of liquors that are kept in crystal decanters on the sideboard, and Mr. Locke looked as he always did: squarish and neat, seeming to reject the aging process as a waste of valuable time. He’d had the same respectable dusting of white hairs at his temples my entire life; the last time I’d seen him, my father’s hair had turned almost entirely ashen.
Mr. Locke looked up from a stack of stained, weathered-looking envelopes as I entered. His eyes were gravestone-gray and serious, focused on me in a way they rarely were. “That will do, Stirling.” I heard the valet retreat from the room, the brassy click of the door latch. Something fluttered in my chest, like bird wings against my ribs.
“Sit down, January.” I sat in my usual chair, and Bad stuffed himself half-successfully beneath it.
“Sorry about Bad, sir, it’s just Stirling seemed to be in a hurry and I didn’t take him back to my room first—”
“That’s quite all right.” The fluttery, panicky feeling in my chest grew stronger. Bad had been banned from Mr. Locke’s office (as well as all motorcars, trains, and dining rooms) since the Society party two years ago. Just the sight of him usually provoked Locke into a speech about poorly behaved pets and lax owners, or at least a grumbling snort through his mustache.
Mr. Locke’s jaw worked backward and forward, as if his next words required chewing to soften them. “It’s about your father.” I found it difficult to look directly at Mr. Locke; I studied the display case on his desk instead, its brass-plate label gleaming: Enfield revolver, Mark I, 1879.
“He’s been in the Far East these past few weeks, as I’m sure you know.”
Father was beginning in the Port of Manila, then island-hopping his way northward to Japan, he’d told me. He’d promised to write often; I hadn’t heard from him in weeks.
Mr. Locke chewed his next sentence even more thoroughly. “His reports on this expedition have been spotty. Spottier than usual, I mean. But lately they’ve… stopped coming altogether. His last report was in April.”
Mr. Locke was looking at me now, expectant and intent, as if he’d been humming a tune and paused for me to finish it. As if I ought to know what he would say next.
I kept staring at the revolver, at the oiled darkness of it, the dull square snout. Bad’s breath was hot on my feet.
“January, are you paying attention? There hasn’t been word from your father in nearly three months. I got a telegram from another man on the expedition: no one has seen or heard from him. They found his camp scattered and abandoned on a mountainside.”
The bird in my chest was scrabbling, beating its wings in frenzied terror. I sat perfectly still.
“January. He’s gone missing. It seems—well.” Mr. Locke drew a short, sharp breath. “It seems very likely that your father is dead.”
I sat on my thin mattress, watching the sun creep butter-soft across my pink-and-gold bedspread. Frayed threads and cotton stuffing made shadows and spires across it, like the architecture of some foreign city. Bad curled around my back even though it was too hot for cuddling, making soft, puppyish sounds deep in his chest. He smelled of summer and fresh-clipped grass.
I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I’d howled, screamed, demanded Mr. Locke take it back or prove it. I’d dug bloody pink crescents in my palms with the effort of not lashing out, not smashing his little glass cases into a thousand shimmering shards.
Eventually I’d felt hands like paving stones on my shoulders, weighing me down. “Enough, child.” And I’d looked into his eyes, pale and implacable. I’d felt myself flaking and crumbling beneath them. “Julian is dead. Accept it.”
And I had. I’d collapsed into Locke’s arms and soaked his shirt with tears. His gruff murmur had rumbled against my ear. “S’all right, girl. You’ve still got me.”
Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn’t see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it.
I thought about the last postcard I’d received from my father, featuring a beach and several tough-looking women labeled FISHERWOMEN OF SUGASHIMA. I thought about Father himself, but could only picture him walking away from me, hunched and tired, disappearing through some terrible, final doorway.
You promised you would take me with you.
I wanted to scream again, felt the sound clawing and writhing in my throat. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to run away and keep running until I fell into some other, better world.
And then I remembered the book. Wondered if Mr. Locke had given it to me just for this moment, knowing how badly I would need it.
I pulled it from my skirts and traced my thumb over the stamped title. It opened for me like a tiny leather-bound Door with hinges made of glue and wax thread.
I ran through it.
The Ten Thousand Doors: Being a Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology
This text was produced by Yule Ian Scholar for the University of the City of Nin, in the years between 6908 and—, in partial satisfaction of his attainment of Mastery.
The following monograph concerns the permutations of a repeated motif in world mythologies: passages, portals, and entryways. Such a study might at first seem to suffer from those two cardinal sins of academia—frivolity and triviality—but it is the author’s intention to demonstrate the significance of doorways as phenomenological realities. The potential contributions to other fields of study—grammalogie, glottologie, anthropology—are innumerable, but if the author may be so presumptive, this study intends to go far beyond the limitations of our present knowledge. Indeed, this research might reshape our collective understanding of the physical laws of the universe.
The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist.
The following pages will offer extensive evidence to defend this conclusion and will provide a set of theories concerning the nature, origins, and function of doors. The most significant proposals include:
i) that doors are portals between one world and another, which exist only in places of particular and indefinable resonance (what physical-philosophers call “weak coupling” between two universes). While human construction—frames, arches, curtains, et cetera—may surround a door, the natural phenomenon itself preexists its decoration in every case. It also seems to be the case that these portals are, by some quirk of physics or of humanity, damnably difficult to find.
ii) that such portals generate a certain degree of leakage. Matter and energy flow freely through them, and so too do people, foreign species, music, inventions, ideas—all the sorts of things that generate mythologies, in short. If one follows the stories, one will nearly always find a doorway buried at their roots.1
iii) that this leakage and resultant storytelling have been and remain crucial to humanity’s cultural, intellectual, political, and economic development, in every world. In biology, it is the interplay between random genetic mutation and environmental change that results in evolution. Doors introduce change. And from change come all things: revolution, resistance, empowerment, upheaval, invention, collapse, reformation—all the most vital components of human history, in short.
iv) that doors are, like most precious things, fragile. Once closed, they cannot be reopened by any means this author has discovered.
The evidence supporting theories i–iv has been divided into eighteen subcategories, presented below as
At least, that is the book I intended to write, when I was young and arrogant.
I dreamed of insurmountable evidence, scholarly respectability, publications, and lectures. I have boxes and boxes of neatly indexed note cards, each describing some small brick in a vast wall of research: an Indonesian story about a golden tree whose boughs made a shimmering archway; a reference in a Gaelic hymn to the angels who fly through heaven’s gate; the memory of a carven wood doorway in Mali, sand-weathered and blackened by centuries of secrets.
This is not the book I have written.
Instead, I’ve written something strange, deeply personal, highly subjective. I am a scientist studying his own soul, a snake swallowing its own tail.
But even if I could tame my own impulses and write something scholarly, I fear it would not matter, because who would take seriously my claims without solid proof? Proof that I cannot provide, because it disappears almost as soon as I discover it. There is a fog creeping along at my heels, swallowing my footsteps and erasing my evidence. Closing the doors.
The book you have in your hands is not, therefore, a respectable work of scholarship. It has not benefited from editorial oversight and contains little verifiable fact. It is just a story.
I have written it anyway, for two reasons:
First, because what is written is what is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. Even my own writings—so damnably powerless—may have just enough power to reach the right person and to tell the right truth, and change the nature of things.
Second, my long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 5